I have an unwritten internal filter on the range of topics blogged here. For a personal venture I have taken up, to run a half marathon in January, I decided to set up as its own blog, on my own domain. So I won’t be really writing about it here- you can see the full details at I Hate Running
http://dommy.com/ihaterunning/
In a nutshell, running is something I have never enjoyed or done seriously, so it’s a challenge for me to do so. As well as I am doing the training as part of a team raising money to support research and education into a cure for diabetes, this October coming up my 35th year since being diagnosed as a Type 1 diabetic.
I mention the blog here only because doing so has become a nice laboratory for poking deeper into WordPress.
I’ve started a Web Site Notes page that describes the tweaks and add-ons I’ve been using. First and foremost, something that is way over due at the CogDogBlog is to jump into a fresher theme, and i made good use of the WP Theme Browser where I found the nifty Travelogue theme. I’ve dug in my own PHP into code for making the banner photos come up randomly as well as a gallery to show all the images used. I’ve got a simple text file driving a set of randomly drawn facts about diabetes (or view them all).
Oh, and I will only mention it here once– if you wish to sponsor my effort to not hate running, see the online sponsor instructions.
Mostly, the proudest thing I’ve got into is using the ability of WordPress to associate…. ahem… metadata with a post. IN this case, for an entry where I have run or biked some training miles, I simply use the WP editing form to enter a number for a custom field to represent the number of miles. This way, on display of a post, only if there is data listed for that entry does it display the littler “Alan-ometer” displaying the training miles logged.
This is pretty powerful when you dive deeper, and provides yet even another dynamic level to things you can do with WordPress in terms of using it as a data manager…. this is all factoring into a new online publication I am working on that will be all fueld via a WordPress back end, but it will look and act not as much like a blog as a publication.
At least, that is my theory, and I am behind on my deadline.
